Barleywine - sweet?

[SKYY]

So I made a big barleywine 6 months ago. I pitched a champagne yeast during secondary, and I added a lot of dextrose (a pound at a time) and fermentation continued for a long time (weeks). So I stopped adding anything, and let it sit. I went to bottle it a week and a half ago, and to my surprise it had a mildly sweet taste to it. Despite this, I added priming sugar, bottled it, and they're slowly carbonating like any other beer I've ever made. FYI, I always fill one plastic bottle, just to test the carbonation, and that's how I know they're carbonating.

Is it normal to have a lot of residual sweetness when making a big barleywine? Or will I have 48 bottle bombs in my apartment?

My hydrometer broke so I didn't measure any gravities.

 

[RM-MN]

So I made a big barleywine 6 months ago. I pitched a champagne yeast during secondary, and I added a lot of dextrose (a pound at a time) and fermentation continued for a long time (weeks). So I stopped adding anything, and let it sit. I went to bottle it a week and a half ago, and to my surprise it had a mildly sweet taste to it. Despite this, I added priming sugar, bottled it, and they're slowly carbonating like any other beer I've ever made. FYI, I always fill one plastic bottle, just to test the carbonation, and that's how I know they're carbonating.

Is it normal to have a lot of residual sweetness when making a big barleywine? Or will I have 48 bottle bombs in my apartment?

My hydrometer broke so I didn't measure any gravities.

This is always a mistake. With a barleywine there would be no rush to bottle (there never really is a rush) so you would have had plenty of time to get a new one. Without it you have no idea if the beer was really at the FG or not which could lead to bottle bombs if it still had a way to go.

Now to answer your question, yes a barleywine could taste sweet for a couple reasons. One is the unfermentable sugars, another is that the yeast reached it's alcohol tolerance and quit, and a third is that the higher alcohol in the barleywine will give the appearance of sweetness.

Champagne yeast doesn't eat the maltose so adding it probably won't change the sweetness left by your beer yeast. It will eat the simple sugar that you used for priming.